Justice League: Dead Stars
by kamateur
Summary: They are destined to become the world's greatest team, but Something Else is aware of their destiny, and it will use all its power to keep them apart. A re-imagining of the origin of the Justice League of America, taking cues from the classic work of Gardener Fox.
1. Prologue: The Stranger's Last Card

Prologue: The Stranger's Last Card.

Don't assume you know the geography here. This America is bigger than the one you're used to, with more roads and cities, each one with a story you've never heard before. In this world, the first generations of traders and fur trappers making their odyssey across America from the settled havens of the colonial powers set up a special outpost as close to the heart of the unclaimed territory as they could manage. There, on the banks of the Mississippi, they traded with the huge population of Native Americans there for fur, and slowly the outpost grew into one of the first major settlements outside the East Coast.

In time, the settlement would become the main way station for travelers making the long westward trek in search of prosperity, and the city that rose up there took its name from what they called it as they passed through: _Central_. Its fortunes would rise, and fall with the prosperity of the country as a whole (currently it was just beginning what would prove a long, slow, decline), but its place in its mythology was fixed. Charles Sage, building his railroad empire at the height of the gilded age might have tried to fool everyone that the place his lines intersected was the _hub_ of the United States _,_ but no one was fooled; Central City was the heart of America.

Where better, then, for an agent of fate seeking answers to a baffling and malevolent puzzle to begin his investigation? He appears on the street corner of an old borough of the city, stepping out of an alleyway that dead-ends behind him, glancing around as if he can _hear_ a faint siren calling to him. Rain pours down on the streets, flooding the gutters, but where he steps the water doesn't so much as ripple and when he passes under a faded awning, his black trenchcoat appears bone dry.

"Please sir…" says a rough voice crowded into the doorjam. A disheveled body huddles there, palm outstretched.

He kneels. His eyes remain hidden by the brim of the fedora he wears, but somehow the begging man senses warmth there and looks at him hopefully as he reaches into his pocket to pull out a silver coin. For a moment it appears to shine with an ethereal glow before he slides it between his gloved fingertips and holds it up to the homeless man. Whatever stamp or insignia it once bore has been worn smooth, but there is no disguising its value.

His speech is strangely antiquated to the beggar's ear, but its meaning is clear. "This is all I could give you," he says. "But I am cursed to carry it forever. If you take it, it must pass back to me eventually, and before it does every person who touches it will suffer some great misfortune for having held it."

"Bah!" cries the homeless man and snatches it from his grasp. His greed has transformed him from a tame panderer to something more feral. He contemplates lunging at the wealthy passerby, but before he can, the stranger lifts his fedora slightly and the man catches the briefest glimpse of his eyes.

He will never remember what he saw there, only that it was enough to convince him of the truth of everything the stranger has told him. He sees suddenly the broken bodies, the lost loves ones, all the death and tragedy of those who cling to the silver the stranger carries in his pocket. He leaps backwards, hands raised up in front of his face to block out that fearful gaze. He whimpers.

Without another word, the stranger stands and turns from the beggar.

"Wait…" comes the small voice.

He turns. The beggar holds up the coin, now begging him to take it back. The stranger reaches down and deftly plucks it from his grasp. The he vanishes into the rainstorm.

The beggar sighs in relief. He knows he has just passed through some terrible trial, but not what the end result will be. He does not yet realize that deep inside him, some terrible demon has been shaken loose from its grip on his soul. Tomorrow, when the storm has passed, he will go visit his sister who he has not spoken to in over four years, and begin the long journey to healing from his life on the streets.

All this the man in the trenchcoat knows as he walks through the storm. A streak of lightning cracks the sky simultaneously with a boom of thunder. He glances up underneath the brim of his fedora and smiles, for he knows that this thunderstorm is perhaps the most significant the world will ever see. He thinks on his time spent talking to Noah, trying to reassure his doubts as rain blanketed the world outside the wooden walls. Everything greatly changed after that, with goodness given its first fighting chance in millennia. So may it be again, if events are allowed to proceed as they should.

This thought spurs him to urgency and he wastes no time letting his instincts lead him to an old shop door set along a row of broken and abandoned fronts of Christy Street. This is the only one that remains undisturbed. The sign on the door has no name on it, only three words. He understands that every person who stands in front of this door will see something different written on it. His oracle reads: _Doorway to Nightmare._

But nightmares lost the power to frighten him long ago, and he opens the door and steps inside.

The parlor abounds in strange scents. The candles in the room are made from the tallow of beasts that exist only in dreams, and crammed into mason jars laced with ill-smelling preservatives are shriveled organs belonging to creatures Dante would have recognized from his tour of hell.

What strikes him most every time he comes here are the books. In between the mason jars, piled on the floors, stacked up some places to the ceiling are bestiaries and grimoires written in forgotten, eldritch languages. He has bargained much, at other times, for a peak at just a single page from one of these books, but that is not why he has come here now.

The owner of the establishment looks up from the table where she has laid out an elaborate arrangement of cards. The pattern spirals towards the center of the table, seeming somehow unbalanced and precarious. Sure enough, only the center card is flipped up, and it reveals no. 16, _the Tower_ ready to crash to the earth. On every side the tower is beset by lightning, but it is not the lightning that worries her, it is the darkness in the sky behind the lightning.

"Welcome, Stranger," she says. Her voice has a Celtic lilt to it that any Welsh or Irishman would pronounce a theatrical embellishment.

When she calls him "Stranger," it is clear that it is the only name the man in the trench coat is known by, here or anywhere else.

"Nimue," says the Stranger.

I should point out that neither of them is speaking English.

She shakes her head. "When you meet me here in the parlor, you will call me by the same name as every person who wanders in off the street."

"Very well," he says. "I greet you, Madame Xanadu, and seek from you a reading of my fate."

"And what a fate that is!" exclaims Madame Xanadu, the soothsayer. "Bound up as it is in the fate of everything. Time, and space, and heaven and hell, all share your fate."

He moves closer to the table while she speaks. He will not sit unless invited, to do so would be perilous even to one such as him.

"Normally such a read would beyond even my capabilities," she says. "But the cards have been waiting for you it seems."

With a random pull from the configuration she produces a card and flicks it at him. It floats through the air and he catches it and flips it around. It is the twelfth major arcana, _the Hanged Man._ Even upside down, the figure's eyes remain hidden in a shadow that has somehow crawled _up_ the branch of the tree.

He scowls. "That isn't funny."

"The cards have their own sense of humor, but that's still you." She says. "Caught forever in the upside-down, in the transition between the personal and the cosmic."

She gestures for him to sit. Once he is seated across from her the cards begin to thrum, as if an electrical charge is passing between the two of them. There are seventy-eight cards in a traditional Tarot deck. Xanadu's deck has any many cards as there are souls on the face of the Earth. She sweeps up the cards from the table; they blur in her hand, faster than any blackjack machine could shuffle them

"It is going to take me a moment to find the proper frequency," she says. "Talk to me."

"I was surprised to find your door here and not in Metropolis," he says.

She shrugs. "There's been a strong pull in this part of the country, since the sky fell in Kansas not long ago. And as I'm sure you're aware, today is an auspicious day for this city."

He nods. "The age is changing over again."

"Hmm…" she murmurs and flips the first card out onto the table. There are no minor arcana here; it's the twentieth card in her deck. A mass of people stand on the ground, eyes upraised. Above them floats a figure, arms outstretched, eyes glowing red, emanating power.

 _Judgement_ , she says. "Sometimes called _the Aeon,_ the new age. The age of the superman has already arrived, although no one realizes it yet. He will judge humanity, to be sure, but will he find them wanting?"

"Are you saying they will only be saved in they deserve it?"

"I'm saying choices must be made, as always." She flips over a second card. A figure floats upside down inside a perfect sphere.

 _"The World reversed,_ " says Xanadu. "As things stand at present, we are cut off from the infinite possibilities of the future. If the world is not righted, everything will collapse."

"I have sensed this," says the Stranger. "Something has come into the world. No, _is coming,_ but even before its waking its dream has invaded our waking, strangling it. _Changing it._ What yesterday was a clear path to the future is now blocked by shadow and despair. I have never felt such power.

Xanadu nods. "The old guardians have passed on." Xanadu taps the first card again. "In their absence time is being rewritten. We are being conquered by something that comes from the dark."

The Stranger's gloved hands grip the table. "Then you _have_ seen it. The Conqueror."

Xanadu says nothing, but her hand trembles slightly as she reaches for the third card which closes out the loop of past, present, and future. It lands upside down. Where normally the chief symbol on the card would stand in the sky, here it rises from the ground. Normally also, there would be a nude woman on the card, but here there is only an eye, red and angry.

 _"The Star reversed_ ," Xanadu whispers in horror. "All hope for the future is lost. There is no guidance, only the onset of darkness. Forever."

A long silence falls over the room.

"I will not accept that" says the Stranger, finally. "I have walked hope's path my entire life, I will not allow the new world that is coming to be stifled in the womb, not if I can do anything about it."

Madame Xanadu says nothing, instead she holds out her hand. It takes him a moment to realize what she is asking. He reaches into his breast pocket and returns the card she had given him.

She places _The Hanged Man_ on the table, in the top right corner. "You are bound now. One of four pillars that will attempt to hold up the world." She draws another card, stares at it a moment, then sets down another card opposite it. _The High Priestess._ The card bears her face. "I'm bound by giving you this reading."

He winces. "I'm sorry."

She hisses at him. "Don't try to deceive yourself or me, you knew this was the cost. You always count it out before you drag people into your wars."

As she says this, there is a ripping sound in the room, as of something tearing its way through thin paper.

"Now that we've set our marks, there isn't much time," she says.

He reaches into his vest and pulls out a gold medallion. It shimmers. "I can yet hold us safe a while longer. Finish the reading."

Hesitantly, she traces her hand over _The Star_. "There are seven minor stars here in the void, do you see them?"

He scrutinizes the card, willing himself not to break his gaze away from that terrible eye, and below it he sees them. "Seven. Always seven."

"Seven is the number of victory," she says. "Seven soldiers will be sent against the world, all riding in the name of the Anti-hope, and bearing his mark in one way or another. We will need our own seven to fight them."

Her hands blur again as she cuts the deck and snaps seven cards onto the table face down. The shelves around them rattle slightly, and it is not the thunder that is causing it.

She flips the first card over. A man holds a lightning rod high, on the table before him are the suits of the minor arcana along with lab equipment. He is clad in a red robe that swirls and shimmers with lightning.

" _The Magician,"_ she says. "Disciple of Hermes. He is reborn this very night."

She flips over the second card. A man sits on a throne, a crown of coral anoints his blonde brow. In his right hand he holds a trident like a regal scepter. His throne is carved into the shapes of a thousand sea creatures swimming in a current.

" _The Emperor,_ the true ruler of this world, with authority over more of its creatures than any other."

She flips over the third card. This one glows the colors of emerald and jade. A man stands in a chariot that flies through the stars. In his right hand is a glowing lance of light.

 _"The Chariot,_ an ancient engine with a very green pilot." She smirks at her joke.

The Stranger screws up his face, willing her to turn the cards faster. His sweat pours down his brow from the strain of protecting them from whatever is trying to batter its way in.

She flips over the fourth of the seven cards. A gorgeous woman wraps both her arms around a lion. Entangled in her hands is a strand of light that wraps the lion up. The lion stares at her, a mix of defeat and desire in its eyes.

" _Strength._ Sometimes called Lust," Xanadu explains. And she flips the next card over as if that is all that need be said.

A hooded figure walks in shadow, red eyes gleam out from beneath its robed head, but they are gentle rather than malevolent. In his right hand is an hourglass filled with fine red sand.

 _"The Hermit._ He's seen so much. Almost as much as you," she looks at the Stranger, currently gritting his teeth. "He's trying to find his way out from under the sands of time.

A crack opened in the ceiling. Instead of the storm-filled sky that should have poured down on them the seam opened up into a void.

"Hurry," says the Stranger.

It's not clear Xanadu hears him. She is thick in the throes of prophecy as she lays down the final two cards side by side.

"Old friends, this pair," she says. One of them is a skeletal figure in black armor. Horns protrude from the tip of the helm. It holds a banner with an emblem on it, a black sigil outlined with ethereal yellow light. It rides a pale horse with a green mane. The horse grins unnaturally through its blood red lips, and seems almost to be trying to buck its rider.

" _Death_ ," says Xanadu. "Always changing, always oncoming, and yet…" she runs a finger over the skull underneath the helmet. "So fragile. Just a pile of bones."

She turns to the other card. "Not like this one." On the card, rides through a field of corn. The stalks grow so high, it obscures the horse and the child appears to float. In his left hand is a red flag that flows around his body. Behind him, the sun shines. When she touches the sun, a beam of light shoots up out of the card, into the ceiling. Whatever is fighting its way into the parlor _screams._

" _The Sun_ " shouts Xanadu. "The divine sent to Earth, the ideal made flesh."

The screaming stops. The hole in the ceiling stitches itself back together.

"You hurt it," says the Stranger.

"I thought there was a chance," says Xanadu. "What these cards represents, it's the only coming together in the universe that can stop what's out there."

In that moment though, he knows _It_ is still around then. "We must hurry. How does this team come together? Under what sign?"

Xanadu shakes her head sadly. "You still don't understand. This is no band of wizards and knights and ghosts for you to assemble. They must come together on their own."

She lays a card down in the lowest corner of the table, opposite _the Hanged Man._ A wild-eyed young man stands looking up at something in the sky, he doesn't notice how close his foot has drifted to the edge of the cliff.

"It will begin the way it always begins," she says. "With _the Fool_."

The Stranger examines the arrangement. Three cards to read the fate of the world, seven to change it, and four to anchor the story.

"There's only one card missing," he says.

She nods. She places it on the table face down. "You asked what sign they will meet under. This is the sign. The other three pillars may break, but as long as this one holds true, the Anti-hope can still be defeated."

As she goes to flip it over, the room shakes again, far more violently than before. One of the bookshelves _explodes_ , bursting into flame and sending burnt pages and shards of glass flying towards them. The Stranger raises the medallion and the shards glance off an invisible barrier.

"You have to get out." Madame Xanadu points at the door. "While we are still connected to the world.

"What about you?" he asks.

She grins, the cards on the table float into the air. One by one they _change._ One becomes a dagger, another a mace. Soon a whole gallery of weapons float around her.

"This is my place of power," she says. "I can secure it, but you have other business."

He nods and strides towards the door.

"Wait!" she calls. And he turns. A knife whips past his head and buries in the door. After a moment if returns to its card form.

"The last pillar," she says.

He takes the card and opens the door and steps back onto the streets of Central City. The air thrums behind him, and for just a moment he can hear her singing a cant he hasn't heard in a millennium. As the door closes behind him he recognizes it as the Song of Merlin.

"Fight well, Nimue," he says. Above him the lightning bears down again, and _this_ is the strike. He can hear the glass breaking as a miracle is born down the street.

He examines the final card. It depicts another brightly clad figure, neither male nor female. Somehow he knows that its robe is sewn from the colors of each of the seven cards on Xanadu's table. In its right hand it holds a sword, in its left, a pair of scales.

Despite the grim tidings, he can't help but smile as he reads the single word written on the bottom of the eleventh card in the major arcana.

 _Justice,_ he thinks. _It's about time._


	2. Chapter One: Snapper Falls Off the Edge

**THREE YEARS LATER**

 **LUCAS**

Lucas Carr is going to die today. That this the thought that keeps going through his head on a loop as he darts out the back door of the Radiojam electronics store. It had taken him longer than he liked to pick the lock, even after he'd spent half the night watching Youtube videos and practicing with the tools from the locksmith's kit he'd stolen out of the back of Mr. Murphy's truck next door to his house. That was three days ago, he hasn't dared to go back since.

He checks both ways before leaving the alley. Main Street is still abandoned, like when he arrived. He knows Sheriff Ross will be driving a circuit through town soon, but for now he must still be at the church, with the rest of the town.

There are between five and six thousand people in Happy Harbor, and almost all of them are working around the clock digging something up under the floorboards of Immanuel Church. He's timed his break-in for as far in between shifts as he can manage, but sometimes people heading to or from the Church end up wandering through the streets in a daze for hours, and he still has the red gash on his forearm where he blocked Sarah Taylor from putting a pair of scissors through his eye on a grocery run. Sarah had been two years older than him in school, he'd had a crush on her for four-and-a-half months that he had kept to himself like the codes to a nuclear missile. In the end, he'd gotten away by hitting her in the head with a can of mushroom soup. And he'd gone to bed hungry that night.

He can't lose the fruit of today's run, it is too important. Lucas is prepared to fight to get back to his "secret base," but he hopes he doesn't have to. That's why he is relieved to see the route back to where he parked his car. He manages to dig one hand into his pocket and click the remote to the Kord Ladybird, then he darts across the street and throws the door open, flinging the armful of electronics into the passenger seat, and gets into the driver's seat.

At that moment he hears the sound of another vehicle approaching from the North side. His head snaps up to see the Sheriff's Cruiser heading down the street. Lucas fights to stifle his panic; he reaches down and grabs the handle to recline his seat. As he lays backwards, he closes his eyes and holds his breath and thinks about how quickly his life has gone insane…

"Snapper," his mom says. She's tapping him on his shoulder to get his attention. He has the headphones in, and he's working his way through a random playlist he found on a subthread on Lexicon, the website where he spends most of his free time.

 _The thief of life  
Moved onwards and outwards to love  
In a one stop only motel_

"Snapper!" she pokes him harder.

He pulls off the headphones and stares at her, not saying a word. The song continues to thrum underneath their conversation.

 _By chance or escaping from misery  
By suddenness or in answer to pain  
Smoking in the dark cinema  
You could see the bad go down again_

"Snapper, will you please put on some clothes and come with us?"

He blinks. "Where are you going?"

His mother sighs. "Snapper, its Sunday, where do you think we are going?"

"Oh," is all he says.

"Could you turn that off?"

He presses pause.

Only now that the music is stopped does he begin to snap his fingers. It's something he does all the time, even though he isn't always aware he's doing it. He knows when the habit first started his parents talked to doctors about it, and that those doctors told them not to worry, that for Snapper at least it was harmless behavior, if something he might not grow out of. So instead, his parents had done their best to treat it as an endearing quirk, right down to giving him his nickname.

A long moment passes between the two of them.

His mother fidgets, "Do you think you can just-"

"-I don't want to," he says.

"Snapper, please."

"I don't believe in God," he tells her.

She winces. "Snapper, we've been over this. I'm no great believer myself, but it's the center of our community. You're a teenager, and no one really expects you to get out of bed every Sunday-"

He interrupts, "-I'm not in bed, I never sleep in, on the weekend."

"I know, that's not the point," she says. She's giving him the look, the one that says, _every book I have read has told me it is not healthy to express my frustration in non-constructive or inconsistent ways._ She doesn't know he's read all her books as well. "The point we have a new Pastor in town, Pastor Marlowe, and he'll be giving his first sermon this morning, and pretty much everyone is supposed to be there."

He thinks about what she has just told him. "I don't see how that changes what I believe," he says.

His mother holds her breath. When she lets it out she manages to avoid sighing again, and gives him a smile that almost, but not quite, hides her annoyance with him.

"All right then. Well, there's some leftover pasta in the fridge. There's a reception at the church after the sermon, so your father and I will probably eat there.

He nods. He's used to eating alone.

"All right then," she says, and kisses him on the forehead. He sits on his bed, laptop paused, staring down the hallway.

He hears his father's voice. "He's not coming, is he?"

"No…"

A brief, sharp laugh. "I told you."

"Oh, stow it," is his mother's last word on the subject.

His parents pass by his door one more time on their way out, both of them clad in their Sunday best.

His father stops and waves at him. "We're headed out," is all he says.

Lucas nods to show he understands. Then, as they pass down the hall, he thinks to call after them. "I love you."

"We love you too," says his mother.

"You too, bud," says his father.

He hasn't seen them since…

The cruiser passes by without taking notice of the car or Lucas hiding inside it. He counts to a hundred to make sure it is long gone, then pulls himself up and starts the Ladybird. Lucas is a decent driver, and he has a lot of experience driving the backroads of town that lead up to Sanctuary Cave. As he drives he turns on the radio. He ignores the music stations, flipping through the band until he finds the weather report. As he had hoped, tonight is a clear night.

As explained to him in middle school, it is called called Sanctuary Cave because Roger Williams himself had been led to take shelter there by the Naragansett Indians when fleeing the Massachusetts authorities on his way to settling Providence. Supposedly the legendary witch-hunter Nathaniel Wayne himself had chased Williams into the mouth of the cave, only to run screaming out again chased by a horde of bats. Even in middle school Lucas thought a grown man being scared of bats was ridiculous, but he liked the rest of the story, and he liked Sanctuary Cave too, so much that it became the obvious place to hide out after fleeing home.

Now he parks the Ladybird at the bottom of a hill, far enough from the mouth of the cave that no one will think to look for his owner there. He gathers his supplies and hikes up the hill and through a band of trees until he arrives at the cave mouth. He carefully slips between the strands of fishing line he's set up as tripwires across the mouth of the cave. They are only connected to some empty cans filled with marbles, but in the silent cavern that would be plenty of noise to wake him up.

Lucas has made himself at home. In the first days after Marlowe took over the town, he still found comfort in keeping close to his old home, raiding the garages of his neighbors for supplies. It was there he picked up the twin coleman lanterns he uses to light the interior of the cave, along with several one-gallon cans that have lasted him weeks of carefully rationed light. He also has an electric generator, although he's saving it for tonight. It is part of the last stage of his plan, along with the other, enormous item in the cave.

He's exhausted. He hasn't slept in days, every time he tries he has the same nightmare. But he needs all the rest he can get before he tries his plan tonight, so he crawls into his sleeping bag with the enthusiasm of someone setting down on a bed of broken glass and closes his eyes…

 _Someone is banging on the door. It penetrates through his headphones and he looks up. For the first time he realizes his parents should have been home hours ago. By the time he makes it to the living room they have already broken down the door. He's sure he's seen these two around town, but he can't remember either of their names._

 _"What are you…?" he starts to ask, but they are already coming towards him. He stumbles backwards into the dining room. He thinks about running, about grabbing a knife, but then his eyes meet one of the intruders and suddenly he recognizes him: Alan Frazer from the hardware store. Only instead of Alan's normal blue eyes he's looking at a soft field of purple. The purple energy flows out of Alan's sockets and sucks Lucas in; he forgets how to walk._

 _For some reason that song is playing in his head again:_

 _And I was gripped by that deadly phantom  
I followed him through hard jungles  
As he stalked through the back lots  
Strangling through the night shades_

 _Something catches his eye in the mirror next to the dining room table. He turns. Instead of his face, there is a man with a hat pulled low over his eyes. He reaching out with a gloved hand as if to shove Lucas, and he says two words._

 _"Get out."_

 _Lucas snaps back to reality. Whatever was holding him has broken. He sprints for the back door. The pair is moving sluggishly towards him. He has plenty of time to make it to the door…_

 _…A hand clamps down on his shoulder, digging into it painfully. He whirls around and finds himself staring into a face of pure evil. He looks just like the lead singer of the band whose song is stuck in his head, only his plume of hair sticking is bone white, and his skin is paler still, almost translucent. His eyes are red pinpricks set into his skull. He opens his mouth: "Make a grown man cry like a girl to see the guns dying at sunset."_

 _Lucas screams…_

…And wakes up back in the cave. That wasn't how it had happened. He'd made it out of the house, and over the back fence. As he'd run into the woods, he'd been able to hear the screams of the other people being dragged out of their homes. There was no pale man, and no man in the mirror, just some strange immunity Lucas possessed to the hypnotic spell Marlowe had cast over the entire town. But something about the dream _feels_ true. Lucas feels as if he is living in a world where dreams and the logic of dreams are suddenly spilling over into waking life, and it isn't as wonderful and exhilarating as he'd always thought it would be.

He checks the light outside; it is getting low, he needs to work while there is still some of it to guide his path through the cave and up to the roof. With painstaking care he drags the transmitter up the sloping path of rock and around a dark bend. From here he's completely in the dark for a stretch, but he has traversed this section so many times he trusts his feet to sort out any slight changes in the incline of the path as he leans his shoulder against the wall to keep his balance and his sense of direction.

It feels like it takes forever, but eventually he makes it to place where light floods into the cave again and he can see his way up to the place where the cave breaks open, and he steps out onto the roof of the cave. Now he is a few hundred feet up above the forest floor that marks the cave's main entrance; on the opposite side is a steep drop down into the Atlantic Ocean. The roof is so gently curved it feels flat, and Lucas walks carefully to the edge and peers over the side to look down into the water.

The first time his father brought him here, they traversed this route with a backpack of sandwiches, which they then ate on the roof while the sun was high over their heads. Lucas had loved every minute of the trek, from the dark, calm space of the cave, to the echoes of his snapping fingers against the walls, to the crashing sound the water made against the cliffside, and his father had been openly relieved at having an outdoor activity to bond him with his son. It remains one of Lucas's happiest memories, and for a moment the tears threaten to well up and overwhelm him with days and days of suppressed grief and stress. For the sake of the job in front of him, he stifles them. He turns around and retraces his route twice more, first carrying only the fully-fueled generator, then the miscellaneous supplies: the antennae, the bandwidth cracker, the signal amplifier, and a seven-iron golf club.

Lucas is a young man of strong fixations; music is one, radio electronics another, but there is one obsession that towers over either of those. He's spent entire days in chatrooms arguing over the best way to accomplish what he is now attempting. All forms of wireless communication have been suggested, people have even debated the efficacy of light signals pointed directly into the sky. None of those will work for Lucas; somehow Marlowe has killed the cell and internet coverage throughout town, and he hopes his current trick will be invisible to the man's arcane gaze. Somehow he senses it won't work, though. He feels a voice in the back of his mind ( _the voice of the Stranger,_ his subconscious whispers), that tells him he better be ready to defend his contraption the second he turns it on. Hence the golf club.

The sun has set. He's working by the light of the Coleman lantern as he connects auxiliary equipment to the transmitter. He sets the cracker and the transmitter to the same frequency, one he has memorized from a thread about the police bands of major metropolitan areas. This one belongs to Central City, hacking into it to play his own message is a felony, and Lucas would be happy to go to go to jail for it so long as it works. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a digital tape recorder. He holds it up to his ear listening to the message one last time before he routes it through the transmitter.

 _"Code Nine-Nine-Nine, repeat Code Nine-Nine-Nine,"_ his tinny voice exclaims through the recorder before listing a series of coordinates corresponding to the location of the cave. He repeats the message to himself as he snaps his fingers, nods, and plugs it in.

The transmitter appears to be broadcasting, but he has no way to know if it's really working. He glances up into the sky, as if willing the signal to bounce farther on the ionosphere. If he's done his job right, his pirated frequency is lighting up receptors over half the country.

"Code Nine-nine-nine," he says to himself, like a talisman, meaning, _EMERGENCY!_ in all capital letters.

"Code Nine-nine-" He coughs.

A fine smoke has appeared in the air. It gathers itself in front of his eyes, swirling and twisting into three columns that begin to take on humanoid shapes. All around him the air fills with a terrible smell he recognizes, but can't quite place.

As the smoke coalesces, Lucas understands that he is doomed. He has summoned something, but not what he intended. The things that appear out of the smoke look human, but Lucas knows they are anything but. It is there in the red glare of their eyes, amplified a million times from the mesmerized stare of the townsfolk. This is _the source._ The three beings enter more fully into existence in front of him, and their faux-human flesh is rubbery and unconvincing, their teeth are bright and sharp and flecked with blood. Lucas recognizes the smell from his home chemistry-set: sulfur.

 _Also called brimstone_ Lucas remembers as the three demons complete their materialization.

I should point out that at this moment there is still time for Lucas to get away, and what's more, some part of him realizes this. The three demons are focused in on the transmitter they've been summoned to destroy. The crack leading inside the cave is right next to him, he can dive down inside and escapes to the Ladybird, and again, a _voice_ assures him they won't follow. He will be free to try another gambit, another day, or perhaps make a desperate bid past the roadblocks the have trapped him in Happy Harbor for the past weeks. All he'll need to trade away is time, and the transmitter, and any opportunity to warn the world what is happening here.

It is in this moment, after weeks of confusion, that he finally remembers the name of the song that had been playing during his final conversation with his mother. The one that's been burning up his dreams every night since:

 _Death is a Star._

The three demons point in unison at the transmitter and Lucas hits one of them across the back of the head with the seven-iron. It shrieks at him, annoyed rather than hurt. He draws back the club for another swing and hits the second demon. His plan is to continue to batter them each in turn, so as not to allow any of them to turn towards the transmitter. He needs to delay them as long as possible, even if it's only a few seconds. For a brief moment it works, and then one of the demons grabs the golf-club. Its strength is unfathomable to Lucas. Rather than yank the golf-club out of his hand, it whispers something and the golf-club begins to glow, white-hot. Lucas smells his hand burning before he feels the pain, but he still does not surrender the club. Instead he uses his free hand to grasp at the demon's eye-sockets, poking and clawing.

"Nine-nine-nine!" he bellows.

The creature lets out another guttural hiss and swats Lucas. He goes flying backwards; his shoulder slams into the rock of the cliffside and his momentum carries him over the side.

Lucas reaches up and grabs the cliff with both hands. His burnt one screams protests at him, but his grip holds. He can't pull himself up, though, his feet are dangling over the side where there is no purchase, and his scrawny arms begin to tremble and seize as he feels gravity dragging him down.

He has time to see the demons turn back to the machine and point again in unison. They spit out a syllable and the transmitter _erupts_ into flame.

 _I'm sorry._ Lucas thinks. As his grip begins to slip away, his last thought is of that conversation with his mother again. He wishes he had tried harder to explain to her; it isn't that he doesn't believe something like God could exist, given his main fixation he would have been foolish to think an atheist's grasp of reality was complete. It's just that having read the Bible, God had always seemed like a bit of a jerk to him, and he wanted Someone a little fairer. A little more…

Lucas lets go and falls. His final thought is incomplete.

Somewhere nearby, lightning strikes.

As the sky lights up, Lucas opens his eyes to find that time has stopped. He is floating in midair above the jagged rocks. No, not floating, _falling,_ but so slowly that it seems not to matter.

Above him there's a red, crackling cloud. At first he thinks it's the demons again, but somehow despite being similarly incorporeal, this form is comforting. Jagged streaks of light arc through it as a red-gloved hand extends towards him.

Even though he does not yet understand what is going on, he reaches for it.

There's a rush of wind through his hair and he's standing on the cliffside again looking down.

"Wha…?" Is all he can manage.

"That's quite a tumble you took there," someone says, and he turns to see a man in a red jumpsuit. He's looking at Lucas through eye-holes cut into a mask, his blue-green eyes filled with genuine concern and empathy. There's no physical similarity, but for some reason, he reminds Lucas of his dad.

"You're-you're," Lucas stammers. He reflexively tries to snap his right hand, but it only erupts in pain and he winces.

"Whoah," says the man in the red suit, noticing the burns. "That's nasty too." His gaze tracks to the transmitter that's currently smoldering. Lucas can see him piecing two and two together, even though it is not quite right. He reaches out and his arm _flickers,_ briefly, and gust of air like from a huge fan darts towards the flame, snuffing it and scattering the wrecked embers of the transmitter to burn harmlessly on the rocks.

Then he turns back to consider Lucas. "So you're the one who hacked into the Central City police scanner broadcasting a nine-nine-nine to this location, huh? That's pretty clever, although it looks like I was almost a little too slow on the uptake."

Lucas still can't process the fact that he isn't dead. He wants to scream, to yell at this man about the demons, but his brain finally catches up to the fact that they are gone, either scattered away by the oncoming lightning, or merely retreating once their mission seemed accomplished.

The man twitches, and his silhouette is in two places at once for a moment. He somehow seems to Lucas a little sad.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner," he says. "And I'm sorry that whatever the emergency was, you felt like you couldn't talk to anyone else about it. But I'm here, and I'm happy to listen."

Lucas realizes suddenly what this looks like. A teen punk has climbed up to the roof of a famous cave and prank-called one of the world's only superheroes before torching the evidence and leaping off the edge as a statement of desperation. He lets out a short, bitter laugh of disbelief, that turns into spasms as everything that has just happened, everything that _keeps_ happening catches up to him. He turns away and vomits over the side. Tears begin to stream down his face.

"I don't-" he retches. "I mean, I didn't-" He chokes on his sobs, hyperventilating, suddenly dizzy. The cliff-face is spinning. He realizes he might pass out, but he needs to finish this thought first. "The town is in trouble. Real trouble. I needed – I need help, we all need a lot of help."

He begins swaying back and forth, his feet sliding backwards once more towards the cliff's edge, but a strong hand claps him on the shoulder and pulls him forward.

Lucas looks up into those eyes, expecting to see skepticism and doubt, like when he tries to explain the latest theories about super-physics to his friends or his parents. Instead he sees understanding and a mirrored concern. Something else too, although it takes him a moment longer to place it. Determination and…respect.

"It sounds like it's a good thing you called me," he says. "I believe you and I'll do whatever I can to help, but why don't we start from the beginning. I'm the Flash. And you are…?"

Lucas looks at the faint lines of sparks dancing off the man's inert costume. He smiles, feeling safe for the first time in a long time.

"Snapper," he says. "My folks call me Snapper."

And then he faints.


	3. Chapter Two: Dueling Magicks

**Barry**

Chill wind blows in from the ocean and across the back of Barry Allen's neck; he doesn't feel it. He catches "Snapper" for the second time and whisks him off the roof of the cave (Sanctuary Cave, he knows, he looked it up in the Central City library before beginning his run).

He lays him down on the forest floor; looks around the woods, and goes exploring, just in the moments before the young man regains consciousness.

He feels guilty. He'd only had a milliseconds to keep Snapper from bashing his head on the rocks, moving someone that quickly always makes them at least moderately light-headed, and for someone who'd suffered such clear stress, it is no wonder he'd passed out.

He arrives at the outskirts of town. The moonlight clearly illuminates the buildings, but all of them are unlit and appear empty. He realizes for the first time that he has crossed time-zones on his way here, and arrived in the middle of the night.

Barry Allen has always had a tendency of hanging around until they turn the lights out. By day he is a forensic scientist at the Central City Crime Lab. There are people whose lives hang in the balance of his casework, so as a rule he never leaves until all the day's evidence has been passed back to the proper detectives and prosecutors. Since getting this "second gig," he's constantly running to the washroom and disappearing for a few minutes at a time while a red streak of motion foils a bank heist or ushers people out of a burning building. Then he stays to make up the time.

He'd been just setting foot out the door when the signal had hit the police band. And he'd come running, as quickly as he could get the lay of the land and the quickest overland route from the public library. Because, God help him, Barry Allen wasn't one to leave someone shouting for help when there was something he could do about it. He never had been, really, but in the last three years, his capacity to "do something about it," has expanded exponentially.

He dashes back to Snapper just in time to catch him blinking awake. He shoots up, looking around frantically.

"Easy, Snapper," says Barry.

Snapper blinks, Barry watches him come back to reality. "Oh, Flash, you're really here. Thank God."

He delivers this in such a flat voice that Barry laughs. "I'm really here. Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, right?"

"That's right," says Snapper pulling himself to his feet. "Home sweet home. At least until Marlowe showed up."

"Marlowe?" Barry asks, careful to keep his tone conversational. He can tell Snapper is already much calmer than he was on top of the cave, but he doesn't want to accidentally trigger another emotional attack.

"He moved into the church the same day everyone got brainwashed." Lucas scans the ground looking for something. He grabs a stick and begins to prod the earth with it.

"They're mindless, like automatons, and if you let one get too close to you, they can mesmerize you. If they can't they'll try to hurt you." He pauses for a long moment, then continues to dig out some more earth. "Marlowe has the majority of the people at the church. From the equipment I've seen them carrying in, it looks like they're digging for something."

He draws an _X_ in the dirt; Barry realizes he's scribbled a rough map of the town. The _X_ marks the church Barry spotted on his burst of reconnaissance.

"You wait here," says Barry. "I'll have a talk with the new pastor."

"He has demons!" Snapper blurts out. Then, "I think, I think he might be magic."

Barry's suit begins to spark as he powers up for another sprint. "I'll be careful."

In Central City, they say a person is "gone like the Flash." Meaning, the next second after he's said these words (and determined to himself that Snapper's going to be alright) Barry is half a mile away.

There's a lot people misunderstand about how the Flash's power works. He just doesn't jog while the world churns in slow motion around him. At the speeds the Flash is moving at, space itself contracts around him in a Lorentz transformation, so that Happy Harbor's mile-long main street is only a few steps from one end to the other for him. And there is the church.

He pulls to a dead stop, but he does not drop out of the transformed-dimensional space he's currently inhabiting. He's learned to linger there by drawing in the strange energy he uses to run and refusing to release it. The sensation is a little like holding his breath, but a lot more like keeping his finger jammed in a live electrical socket.

In this space Immanuel Church looks squashed and distorted like something pulled too-tight along the line of the Flash's speed. The Flash is used to this, but he is not prepared for the waves of emanating red energy that pulse from the church like an evil heartbeat. The phenomenon fills Barry with dread. He can taste those red waves, like rust and charcoal, and growing in strength and frequency, he's sure of it.

This is what he has come to think of as "peripheral information," a strange perceptual side-effect of how his mind functions inside this high-speed running space. Along with radiowaves and other forms of radiation that are clearly visible to him when he runs (and inspired him to install two radio-antenna into the earpieces of his outfit), there are other, more esoteric signals that seem completely untethered from his day-to-day reality. He has seen the radiation produced by technology from the far future, weather and temperature disruption waves from esoteric science-fiction weapons, and even brief glimpses into alternate realities, but he has never seen anything like this. He doesn't want to admit that Snapper could be right, but he doesn't have another name for what he's looking at that isn't _magic._

None of this makes him hesitate for an instant as he zips inside the church.

Immanuel Church was once a place of immaculate hand-carved pews and solemn contemplation of God. Now the space has been disrupted, the rows torn out and the floorboards ripped up to reveal a yawning pit that stretches down deep into the earth like a gutter into hell. There are people in the pit, digging, and people around the outskirts of it collecting dirt to haul outside in wheelbarrows. All of them have the same, empty, spiteful glare that fixes on Barry the moment he steps across the threshold of this now unholy place.

"My god…" he mutters in horror.

"Welcome, scion of Hermes," a booming voice calls out to him from the other side of the pit.

The room is lit by work-lights that have been hauled in from some roadside project. They cast long shadows in the room. Out of one the shadows steps a man of medium height. He's dressed like some ancient monk in a long blue cassock, hands hidden in the folds of his joined sleeves. His hair is obscured under a rounded cap with fabric trailing down the sides and back of his neck. His face is ageless, his eyes ancient, he smiles his dark charismatic grin at the Flash.

"Welcome," he repeats. "Brother magus, I heard the call that summoned you here, but I was not sure it would reach you in time."

"You're Marlowe?" asks Barry.

The man throws back his head and lets out a booming laugh that bounces off the rafters of the high ceiling. "A joke of mine. I take the names of men who have told my story from time to time. Elsewhere I have been Brother Johann, and Monsieur Berlioz, and a dozen others. But Marlowe is my favorite."

He throws wide his arms as he intones:

 _Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed  
In one self place, for where we are is hell,  
And where hell is must we ever be._

Barry flickers in place as he struggles to place the line of seemingly-familiar poetry. He wants to dash around the edge of the room and knock out this strange man before he knows what hit him, but he suspects if he acts rashly _he_ will be the one caught unawares. So he thinks. _Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed._ It isn't Shakespeare. Its…

"Christopher Marlowe," he says. " _Doctor Faustus."_

The man smiles his mad, satanic smile. "That's me. Faust. Felix Faust." And he bows.

"That's impossible," says Barry. "Faust is a legend. Its hundreds of years old."

" _Thousands_ of years old," Faust corrects him. "Although the details of the story have changed. And my name of course. I traded my true name to the god-demon Nergal in exchange for a double lifespan and the names of a thousand other demons and spirits. I wandered the earth striking bargains with each of them in turn, for pieces of my torn and shattered soul, and the blood of what innocents I could lure to their doom."

He recites this litany of abominations fit for a pulp-horror with the bored air of a manager who just wants to make sure that everyone in the room is up to speed. Barry can't help but believe him, even though he doesn't want to.

"What do you want with these people?" he asks.

"Ah, well, the people are just means to an end," says Faust. "What I want is down there." He gestures to the pit. "What's down there is the key to a Being greater than all the devils I've previously begged combined."

Barry's heard enough. "Yeah? Well I don't care. I'm going to give you one chance to set these people loose from whatever magic spell you have them under, or I'm going to run you to the middle of the ocean and leave you there."

Faust cocks his head. He stares at Barry with bulging eyes, then he breathes a deep sigh and shakes his head. "I had hoped for greater understanding from one who walks the path of Trismegistus. But you heroic fools are all the same."

Suddenly the air is heavy and black. Faust's eyes flash with demonic energy. "I will make _you_ a counter-offer. Run. Run very far away and do not come back here until my work is done. These people have already been marked as an offering to the Anti-hope that sleeps beneath the world, there is nothing you can do to save them."

For the first time in this strange dialogue, the corner of Barry's lip lifts in a gentle smirk. "Wanna bet?"

He shifts into a higher gear, still sub-sonic, but moving at such a blur that he's across the room faster than an eye can blink…

…And it's not enough.

What happens next happens _everywhere at once_. The air shakes with cataclysmic fury that rocks the Flash and brings him stumbling to a halt, leaning against the wall as painful tremors rock his body and mind. He screams and grips his head. Instinctively, he beings to cycle his body through various frequencies of vibration, trying to escape the web of pain, but it doesn't seem to be obeying the physical laws he is used to, instead it is _inside_ of him.

Not since the night when the lightning struck him and ripped every molecule of his body to pieces has Barry Allen known such intense torment. Distantly, he can hear Faust chanting in some eldritch tongue, arms outstretched at the speedster. The room is filling with smoke and above the pit a trio of beings seem to be in process of _manifesting._

He forces himself to focus on the sound of that chanting, and throws out his arm, fingertips outstretched. Like with the fire earlier, he spins his arm like turbine, so quickly that it creates a vacuum in the air around him. As air rushes back into the vacuum, a concussive column of wind shoots in the direction he points, directly at the wizard. It knocks Faust off his feet. Immediately, the pain stops.

Barry jumps up. He's ready to lunge at Faust when someone grabs his arm. He turns and finds an elderly woman with glowing eyes bearing her teeth at him. She reaches towards his eyes with one clawed hand and he has no choice but to grapple with her for a moment in order to free himself, but already more of the mesmerized minions of Happy Harbor are crowding around him, desperate to do their masters bidding. They are climbing up out of the pit, he is pinned on the narrow bit of walkway that remains now that most of the floor has been ripped up. There is no space to run.

Barry presses his back to the wall, staring at the shambling horde ready to rip him apart. His eyes take in the demons materializing in the air, the self-assured look on Faust's face as he pulls himself back up, and realizes he isn't going to win this battle.

 _Time to do what I do best,_ he thinks, but the thought stings. He cycles up for another burst of speed as hundreds of hands reach for him. He's aware that his timing has to be perfect or the shockwaves he will release in the wake of this next feat will tear these innocent people to shreds.

There are multiple theories about how the Flash's power work, but one thing is clear: Barry Allen has not been biologically human since the accident. At his highest speeds he doesn't accelerate so much as _unspool_ himself into a ribbon of atoms that vibrate at multiple indeterminate locations, unleashing energy from some other plane of existence that, powerful enough to accelerate a human body to unimaginable speeds, is also powerful enough to blow this entire church to splinters.

But he has learned he can shunt most of that energy back into whatever space it comes from in the millisecond after he calls on it, like opening an enormous door a tiny crack and then shutting it again as quickly as possible so the majority of the air let in gets pushed back out again. The process isn't perfectly efficient (hence the lightning trails he leaves everywhere he goes), but it keeps him from shattering windows or igniting buildings on fire from the frictional heat his body produces. Still, he hates to pull this stunt close to people.

His back still to the wall, he vibrates his body until it is just a foam of discrete atoms, then he _shunts_ all of them simultaneously to a different orbit. Just like that, he phase shifts through the wall of church. A line of faint scorch-marks runs up the wall, but it doesn't ignite.

Barry gives himself over to the speed, in milliseconds he is on the other side of town, in less than a minute he is back at Sanctuary cave. As always when he pulls this trick, some part of him doesn't want to slow down. He wants to take off across the Atlantic Ocean; he wants to run and run and run until he accelerates so fast that he could leap out of Earth's orbit with a skip off a tall cliff. He knows he could do it, and that the only thing it would cost him would be coming apart forever. It's all some part of him has ever wanted, to be scattered and never whole ever again.

He shakes the thought away as he comes to a stop next to the cave. It hurts, slowing down. He lets the pain and disappointment of coming back to mundane reality out with a sigh, then turns to regard Snapper.

The young man has retreated back to the mouth of the cave. He rushes forward when Barry appears, eager to hear what has transpired in the minutes since he left.

"Flash?" he calls out, his tone full of cautious hope.

Barry hates to disappoint him, but he shakes his head slightly. "That fight got away from me a little," he admits. "You were right, Faust - Marlowe that is -has magic. _Real_ magic."

Snapper's disappointment is palpable. Barry tries to console him with an assured grin. "Don't worry, it's only the first round. We'll find a way to beat him." He gazes back in the direction of town. "Although I'm not sure we have much time."

As if on cue, the earth begins to shake. The quake is brief and intense; Barry can hear rocks shifting inside the cave, he's grateful they weren't inside when it started. As soon as it passes, Snapper looks at him with wide-eyes.

"What was that?"

Barry's expression is solemn, he can't hide his concern. "I don't know."

But some part of him _does._ Faust told him he was looking for the key that would open the door to some immense cosmic being. This earthquake feels exactly like such a being stirring in his slumber. He thinks of those magical, malevolent waves that radiated from the church. He feels a chill of fear run down his spine as he wonders what _else_ is out there hearing the echo of those waves, if other nightmares are being summoned the same way Snapper's signal summoned him.

He looks at the young man, snapping his fingers absent mindedly in the dark. Dawn has yet to break. _I saved him,_ Barry thinks. _Caught him off the cliff. Now who's going to catch me?_


End file.
